Rambling, rumbling, rumination

Cloning Clyde

Our company’s Cloning Clyde game released on Steam! Finally, my four-year-old’s favorite XBox game can be played on the PC. It’s a fun platformer with a delightfully weird sense of humor. The clone mechanic and DNA splicing make for some great platforming.

It’s even on sale at the moment, though the baseline price of $5 isn’t all that painful to start with.

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Hi Tesh. I hear a lot about smaller developers who target the pc. I notice your company goes for console first. Is that common? Without betraying any company secrets can you talk about how the platforms compare from a dev standpoint?

We got in on the XBox Live scene pretty early, and it was good to us. The company did start with PC games before I got there, but we’ve found a niche on the console. Microsoft likes us, so it’s been a good strategy. I do think that generally, most smaller studios at least start with the PC for ease of development; you don’t need a devkit (specialized testing console), which can be expensive, and you don’t have to learn the console’s quirks. The distribution of PC games tends to be a bit easier, too, since there are a lot of channels to go through, or even just self-publishing. At the same time, developing for a console means you can aim for a pretty consistent set of hardware specs and not worry overmuch about compatibility.

I wish I could speak to the programming side, but that’s beyond my expertise. From an art standpoint, it’s pretty much the same. Polycount might change a bit, as might the texture budget, but art is art.

Interesting to hear Tesh. I am just a clueless consumer but I get the feeling that there is something of a revolution going on in the world of gaming and smaller studios are at the heart of it. As a PC gamer I only see that side of things but it is good to hear that it is happening on consoles too.

Well, to be totally fair, Cloning Clyde is, for the largest part, the brainchild of J. Kenworthy. He’s also behind the spiritual sequel, Ancients of Ooga.

Er, wait, I probably read that “thanks” wrong.

How about this: If he likes kicking chickens, try kicking Keflings in the A Kingdom for Keflings or A World of Keflings.

Er, wait. Maybe that was sarcastic. Y’know, being all caps and all.

Um… is it any consolation that my four-year old loves to kick Keflings? I have a hard time telling her it’s not really a good idea to kick people in real life when she’s giggling her head off and the Keflings keep coming back for more, always cheerful.